


Anemhaid

by Merileigh



Series: Bound [4]
Category: GreedFall (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, The world according to Constantin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 10:22:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23469850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merileigh/pseuds/Merileigh
Summary: I’ve had so many conversations with you in my head, Cousin, you might think I’ve gone mad. –But I must learn to stop calling you that.I’ve made a discovery. Something so miraculous that I can hardly believe it, even though I’vefeltit.You are the only one I want to share it with.
Relationships: Constantin d'Orsay & Catasach, Constantin d'Orsay/De Sardet
Series: Bound [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1619806
Comments: 18
Kudos: 41





	1. The Ritual

__

_I see a mountain at my gates_  
_I see it more and more each day_  
_What I give, it takes away_  
_Whether I go or when I stay_

I’ve had so many conversations with you in my head, Cousin, you might think I’ve gone mad. –But I must learn to stop calling you that.

I’ve made a discovery. Something so miraculous that I can hardly believe it, even though I’ve _felt_ it.

You are the only one I want to share it with.

__

***

I don’t remember much of our trip out to the stone circle, Couwis, Catasach called it; I was so unwell then, and delirious. Nothing could cool the fire in my blood. Someone had bundled me into the back of a cart, and Catasach rode up with the driver. I could hear him speaking occasionally as we went down the road. I could feel the sun on my face, and at times, I saw shadows moving. They must have been trees, or perhaps they were clouds passing across the sun. I remember thinking at one point that this was my first time experiencing any of the island beyond the walls of New Sérène, and I wasn’t going to see any of it. Nothing was vivid. The entire world had been reduced to a fog.

I couldn’t tell you how long we traveled. When Catasach woke me, the cart had stopped, and I heard the sounds of the guards that had come with us, a few men of the Guard who had stayed loyal and some of our own soldiers, setting up camp. They called to one another and bantered as they wrestled tents into place and stowed weapons. Catasach got his arm underneath me and fairly carried me off the cart. He told the captain that we would go ahead—there was no time—and then I was being supported between Catasach and one of the guards down a path strewn with stones and other obstacles they had to maneuver me awkwardly around. The air was cooler here, so cold on my skin that I was shaking uncontrollably. At that point, even the shadows I could see were fading into a dim blackness; it was growing late.

They put me down on something soft—moss. I could feel it against my palms when I had to put my hands down to support myself. Catasach had knelt down next to me. I could hear stone scraping on stone, and after a few minutes of this he held one of the stone bowls to my lips for me to drink. The potion was bitter and smelled like the bark of the trees that must grow in this part of the island. It left a clean sensation on the back of my tongue.

Catasach picked up my left hand and placed something long and smooth in my palm. “It is a knife,” he said. “You must cut your hand, here.” He lifted my right hand and drew a finger across my palm. “This is the ritual we use to bind ourselves to Tir Fradi. The island gives us strength, and in turn we give ourselves to the island. The bond may give you your health. But if the soul of the island grants you this, Constantin, know that you bind yourself to give as much as you receive.

“Will you bind yourself?” he asked me.

I know I nodded. I tried to say “yes,” but I wasn’t sure if he had heard me. Anything. I would do anything.

“Cut your hand and give your blood to the earth. Offer yourself. These are the words— _a ruicht neis diri, ades da ma rharmam._ ”

I drew the knife across my palm and felt a sharp, stinging pain and blood welling up. I stumbled through the words he had spoken and heard Catasach speaking them with me. He took my hand and pressed it into the moss, and then he took the knife from me. He must have cut his own palm. I sensed him next to me put his own hand down, and he muttered in the islander language, repeating the words over and over in a low chant, “ _Men é dad, men é dad, men é dad…”_

What happened next will stay with me forever, I think.

The ground trembled beneath my hand, and I heard the sounds of great footsteps, like those of a beast much larger than a man, coming closer. At my side, Catasach did not move, which put me a little at ease; though to tell the truth, I would not have made it one step if we’d had to flee. The footsteps sounded in a circle around me, then stopped. I could hear growling breaths, feel the weight of the beast’s regard—almost as though it was looking into me, measuring me. It was one of the guardians of the island; it had to be. And I, who had never measured up in my life, was being judged.

And it found me worthy.

I heard something heavy being shifted in front of me; the ground shuddered once more. And then—the words to truly describe it don’t exist—I felt more alive than I’ve ever felt. I felt that I was not just myself but everything living and not in that place, from the rocks to the guardian that now stood in front of me. That I could see, now that the fog had lifted from my eyes. And I knew the purpose of everything, how it all fit together in cycles within cycles of life and death, taking and giving. I had wanted only to feel like my old self again. I had not even known what it had been possible to ask for.

The head of the guardian was crowned with antlers, or perhaps branches. Its face had a muzzle like that of a horse, and it walked on split hooves. Hair like trailing moss hung from its head, down to a stout chest as wide as the cart that had carried me here. It towered over me next to a standing stone that was covered with the native’s markings. When I looked into that face, I could see something unexpectedly human in its eyes, and I felt…something—like a memory, a sense of a human life, a touch on the shoulder, though the shoulder was not mine, and a hand offering a knife.

The guardian let out a long sigh and shook its head vigorously like a horse might, then it backed away from us into the trees, disappearing more quickly than something so large should be able to.

I looked over and saw Catasach’s face clearly for the first time. He was smiling at me, when always I’d pictured him in my mind as a somber sort of man; it creased the skin around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth and made him look younger than I had thought he was. I laughed to see it and with that felt like I could inhabit my body again. Some of the expansiveness left me, though I still felt that embodied knowledge of this place and everything in it.

Catasach had shifted on his knees to face me, and he took hold of my shoulder. “Are you well, _renaigse_?” he asked. “—But you are no longer a _renaigse_. You are _on ol menawi_ now.”

“My friend,” I said, shaking my head. I would take me days to find the words to even begin to express what I felt. “Is this how you feel? Do all… _on ol menawi_ feel this way? I—I feel better than I’ve felt in my entire life.”

“It is a gift from _en on mil frichtimen_ to the _Yecht Fradi_.” He sobered some and settled back to sit cross-legged on the ground, gesturing for me to do the same. “I did this to save your life, Constantin, but our young people, our _sin ol menawi_ , listen and meditate for years before they bind themselves. There is much you do not know.

“If you will listen,” he continued, “I will stay and teach you.”

I wonder if you could have had a sense of who Catasach was when you brought him to me, Cousin. No man I ever met on the continent or in New Sérène was like him. He was tireless in his efforts to cure me, but always so calm. It was as if he drew strength from a deep well that ordinary men have no notion how to access.

“Catasach,” I said then, “I’ll learn whatever you have to teach me. You would honor my house if you’d stay.”

We sat together in the stone circle into the night. Catasach talked, and I listened—your Constantin a willing and attentive student, if you can believe it. Poor de Courcillon is not half the teacher Catasach was. I could have listened to him until dawn and felt as fresh as if I’d slept the whole night. He told me about the stone circle, how the stones are marked with the hands of generations, how the guardians—the _Nádaig_ —are the ancestors of the clans that live in this forest, _donegaida_ who grew old and gave themselves over to the calls of their god.

Their god, the mysterious _en on mil frichtimen_. When I had woken that morning, a god had been nothing more than a superstition, a name to call out in the face of the consequences of a night of drinking or a bad hand at cards. But that had been before I’d been healed by a wave of vitality emanating from the island that could not be explained as anything other than godlike.

Catasach did not have time to share much with me about _en on mil frichtimen_. The moon had not yet risen above the trees when we heard shouts and screaming from the men we’d left back at the camp and the cries of beasts coming closer. Catasach was on his feet at once, pulling me up, and the three guards who had come with us to the stone circle ran toward us, blades in hand. They looked to Catasach for direction.

“Go,” he said, pointing the way. “Follow the path.”

One of the guards took me by the arm. “Your Highness—”

“I will follow behind,” Catasach said when he saw me hesitate. “Go!”

We ran. Stone walls rose high on either side of us, and the moon was not yet high enough to light the way. All the power I had felt I possessed an hour earlier seemed to drain away, and I had the body of a sick man again, wasted and frail after the days I’d spent confined to my bed. Stones tripped me; branches caught at me. My escort’s hand was hard around my arm, and he was pulling me along like he would tear it from its socket and take only my arm with him if the rest of me would not _bloody go faster_. His fear carried me onward, while my mind was occupied with the noises rising behind us—the barking and hair-raising yips of our hunters and Catasach, shouting. I heard his voice raised several times, then tearing sounds like the very stones were being pulled asunder. After a time, the noises of the beasts seemed to come from farther away, as if we were outpacing them.

I wasn’t paying attention to the road ahead of us when we reached a place where the stone walls opened up, and the guards in front of me stumbled to a halt. Another of them reached out to brace me under my other arm when I began to sag. Our breaths came in panting gasps that we could not hear over the growling of the beasts that stood in front of us, as large as mastiffs but scaled like lizards, or dragons. Their muzzles narrowed to a stabbing point like a hawk’s beak.

I had lived my entire life without even once thinking that being eaten alive by a wild beast was a possibility, until that moment when I had to come to terms with the idea. I’m not ashamed to tell you I was afraid. Now, afterward, I feel as though you must not have told me even half of what you’ve encountered on your travels across the island. You want to protect me even from worrying. You are always protecting me.

You have no idea how much I wish you had been with me that night. If you had been, I know things would have ended differently. You would have saved him, when I could not.

Catasach caught up with us; I felt his hand on my shoulder. “We must get past,” he said, and I could see the effect his calm demeanor had on the men. They set their jaws and hefted their weapons. A fight was something they understood, even if the rest of our dilemma made no sense to them. “The tenlan have thick skins,” Catasach continued. He lifted his own weapon, a massive obsidian ax. “You must strike hard, the head or the legs. Or use—” he gestured at the rifle one of the men carried across his back. “Puncture the skin.”

He looked at me with some concern. I could feel the beads of sweat standing out on my skin, and I knew what he would say before he said it. “Constantin—”

“I will stay out of the way,” I answered before he could finish. I regret the way I spoke to him now. Bitter, thinking only that I was being stowed in a convenient corner again. “Your rifle and ammo, soldier,” I said to the man across from me. “I can shoot, at least.”

Moments later that man was dead and another of the guards with him, torn down by the claws of the tenlan. Catasach had single-handedly killed two of the beasts with blows to their necks, and I had taken down another with the rifle. It thrashed on the ground, shrieking. I hadn’t even managed to kill it, and I had used half the ammo in the guard’s pouch. Another beast had curled itself into a living cannon ball and was careening toward me. A round would not stop it. I scrabbled back, up against the rocks, grasping for a hold, any hold, and slipping. Then a root burst from the earth in front of me and struck the tenlan like a whip, knocking it off its path and away from me. Two other tendrils wrapped around it and held it, struggling, against the rocks.

Catasach suddenly was in front of me, facing three other tenlan that were stalking us. There were too many of them. I had opened my mouth to say as much when we heard something new—the shouts of men from the rocks above us to the east. There was help coming, all unexpected.

They weren’t my guards; those men must all have been dead. It was a company of Alliance soldiers coming down the rocks. They came at the tenlan from behind, and with the beasts’ attention divided, we were able to take down the remaining three. I had no ammo left, but I kept the rifle with me as we carried on down the path. I thought I could use it as a club—even though the fight we’d just survived should have been proof enough of how ineffective that would be. I would rather have something in my hands than nothing at all.

“My lord,” said one of the Alliance men, their captain probably. He stayed beside Catasach and me as we ran. “What happened? We’ve never seen an attack like this.”

I told him what I knew, in gasps, Catasach speaking at times when I had to pause to breathe. Between my poor account and his greater depth of knowledge, we patched together a story that seemed to make some sense to the captain. When we finished, his face had a grim look to it, as though he understood our desperation even if he could not fully grasp the how or why. In that way, his face was a mirror of my own thoughts.

We fled into another open space and this time had not a breath to prepare before more beasts were on us, and men to either side of me were screaming and dying. And now even Catasach looked afraid. He had one hand on my arm as he bent down to press his other palm to the earth to call out roots to knock the maddened animals aside.

That was when I felt a tremendous buffeting blow against my chest and the very air around us seemed to burst into flame. Whatever it was threw me to the ground. When I managed to catch my breath and struggle up on one elbow, what I saw… Fire—the trees were burning, and there were rocks strewn across the clearing that had not been there before. They too glowed red, seeming to burn from within. Rocks had fallen on men and beasts alike, crushing them. Most of the men who had come to our aid lay dead around me. I could see a few of them struggling to rise like I was and, nearer to me, Catasach, who was on his feet and staring up at one of the huge guardians, this one twice as tall as a man, with clawed hands and huge wings spread like an eagle guarding its prey. It crouched on the legs of a giant bird and turned to gaze at me. Its face was at once human and bestial, and the same branches that crowned the heads of the islanders grew from its brow and jaw. As it drew in its wings and came toward me, I called out to Catasach for help.

He came to kneel on hands and knees in front of me, and behind him the _Nádaig_ loomed. “Show no fear,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “I do not think it means you any harm.”

“What is this—this monster? Why is it attacking us?”

“I don’t know. –I don’t understand”—and to hear him say that, if I had not already been full of fear, I would have then been afraid for our lives—“It is as if it seeks you out. It wants you.”

Before I could even make sense of the words, Catasach was thrown backwards by a force I could not see to land on his back at the _Nádaig’s_ feet. A man, tall and dressed in the robes of the natives, his head sprouting a veritable forest, walked past me. He stalked toward Catasach, who scrambled back from him. The man—was he our attacker?—spoke to Catasach in their own language, and I watched my friend and teacher’s face change, his mouth falling open and his brows drawing together with incomprehension and growing horror. Our attacker spread his arms wide; I did not need to understand his words to see the contempt in the gesture.

He killed Catasach in front of me.

I wasn’t thinking then. The barrel of the rifle was in my hands, and I was stumbling, almost falling toward him. I remember screaming something.

He dodged my wild blow easily. His hand caught me by the back of my neck, and he shoved me forward to fall on the stones that had buried Catasach until nothing of him was visible.

That was the last thing I remember from that night. I woke sometime later, stripped of my coat and boots and chilled by a wind that blew without ceasing. The sun was high in the sky, and I lay on my side on a nearly barren, rocky plain. A tall cliff rose in front of me. For a moment I thought I was alone, but then I heard him speaking in a low growl. I knew the voice. The man who had killed Catasach was behind me, pacing and muttering to himself. Sometimes he stopped speaking as if pausing in conversation and listening to someone, though I could hear no one else. I kept still and tried to keep my breathing even, but before long I felt his attention turn to me. And I knew that he knew I was awake.

He prodded me with the toe of his boot between my shoulders. “Stand,” he said in the tone of voice of someone who is used to giving orders and being obeyed. He was a chief, a _mal_ , of some sort.

I felt every abused muscle when I struggled up on hands and knees and then to my feet, as though I had been beaten and then slept on rocks for a week. And judging by what I heard afterward from Lady Morange and Albert, my valet, how much time passed before you found me, perhaps I had. I knew I had been asleep, but I couldn’t remember any dreams or even fragments of dreams. Had I been asleep or had I been dead? Was there a difference?

But I knew that I hated this man, and I knew why I hated him.

He regarded me, tilting his head back to look down his nose at me. The skin around his eyes was blackened as if he was ill or had not slept for many days. His brow and cheeks were strangely lined, with some markings of the natives, they must have been. The branches that grew from his skull spread to a crown atop his head more impressive than any I’d seen on an islander. “Stupid, thoughtless boy,” he growled at me. He started to pace around me again.

I bared my teeth at him and felt my lips crack and bleed. The first time I tried to speak, I had no voice. I had to work to get some moisture in my mouth and swallow, before I could croak, “Why did you kill him? Catasach did not harm you.”

He came into my sight, and I caught him gesturing sharply with one hand as if to push my words away. “He did not need to die.”

“Yet you killed him. It was in your hands, monster.”

“I?” he asked, turning to face me and raising his eyebrows in a show of incredulity. “A— _monster_ —knows his own.” He hissed through his teeth, deriding me. “But this is my land, _renaigse_ monster.”

Then his voice changed; some of the fire went out of it. I had the sense that he wasn’t speaking only to me. “I will do what is needed.”

Before that moment, I truly had not given thought to myself or that I was about to die. I had been too angry to see past the look on Catasach’s face before his death, still looming so large in my memory. But when the man turned to walk away, some bewildered part of me decided to make an attempt at surviving. I had nothing, no gun, no knife hidden away in my boot—hells, I didn’t have a boot. There was nothing around me I could use as a weapon—nothing except the rocks. I knelt down as quietly as I could and felt around until I found one with sharp edges that would fit in my palm.

“Here, _renaigse. Monisainaig._ Come,” I heard him say behind me. He called me like a dog, so like a dog I went, my head hanging so my hair covered my eyes, the hand that held the rock clutched to my side as if my ribs were paining me. I was thinking of your face, the way you looked after I’d thrown a bottle at your head, mistaking you for one of the gutter rats that had kept me captive that last night in Sérène.

When his feet came into view, before he could grab hold of me, I lunged, blocking the arm that he raised by instinct and striking at his head with the rock. But he leaned away and kicked me brutally hard in the knee, and I slipped. He drove me down to my knees, one hand on my shoulder, while his other thumb dug into my wrist until my fingers opened and the rock fell clattering atop the other stones beneath me.

He bent over me, and we glared hatred at each other. “You will _stay here_ ,” he said, giving emphasis to the words with hard jerks of his hand, “apart from the earth. You cannot return.”

He put his hand over my eyes.

I had no sense of how much time had passed when I woke in the dark, in my own bed in the governor’s palace, alone.


	2. Monster

__

_I see a mountain in my way_  
_It’s looming larger by the day_  
_I see a darkness in my fate_  
_I’ll drive my car without the brakes_

Everything around me felt familiar and not, comforting and wrong all at once. I woke sometime in the middle of the night, and I should have been relieved to be alive and in my own bed, by some miracle. Instead I was brimming over with anger. I couldn’t lie still.

I left my bed and paced the room, barefoot and dressed in the sleeping gown and robe someone had wrestled me into while I’d been asleep. I avoided the books and papers I’d discarded in piles on the floor out of a half-conscious desire to be left alone more than any concern for keeping quiet. Even then, I knew that somehow you had found me and saved me from the dark fate waiting for me on that mountain; that was no mystery. It was my own feelings at that moment that I couldn’t understand. I was well enough to be out of bed, walking on my own two feet, when I should have been dead. Why, then, did it feel as though the world had shifted off its foundations?

I only remembered Catasach when I started to walk almost unseeing, lost in my thoughts, past the desk where his things still lay, the stone bowls and boxes and small leather pouches holding the remedies he’d brought with him from his village, Wenshaveye. Catasach—how could I have forgotten? I almost expected to see him there when I turned to look at the rug he’d insisted on using for a bed. How could I have forgotten him? He’d sat by my bed all those nights that the malichor had burned through me, talking, telling me stories about his clan and the _Yecht Fradi_ until the potions made the pain feel distant and I was able to sleep.

Not stories—truths.

I picked up one of the rough stone bowls, and as if my memories had been enclosed in a locked chest and that simple object was the key, I remembered the stone circle, all the wonder and strangeness of the ritual, and the words that Catasach had spoken after. _If you will listen,_ he’d said, _I will stay and teach you._

I remembered he had died. How long ago had that been, that I’d forgotten it?

He had wanted to teach me about…about the bond. Standing in my room, surrounded by the objects from the continent I’d known all my life, I questioned if I had actually experienced and felt the things I was starting to remember. Had I seen a _Nádaig_ , and had it carried the memories of a man? Had I truly felt the souls of animals and inanimate things alike? That there was no other explanation at hand for my impossible recovery and the things that I now knew to be true was the only proof I had.

***

The whole of that morning, I felt as though I was standing outside of myself, watching the habitual motions of my life as a stranger. Everything had changed, and nothing had. Albert helped me dress, and I went down to take breakfast in the small dining room. Both de Courcillon and Fabron were already at the table, and they seemed to know everything that had happened. De Courcillon questioned me—how did I feel, what had happened before the attack—but carefully. He certainly knew my moods, good and bad; he must have sensed my irritation behind the short answers that I gave him. I couldn’t stomach more than a few bites of bread, and with nothing else to do but what had been laid out in front of me, I stood, making some excuse, and left them for the receiving hall.

That was how you found me, Cousin, full up past my ears with an ill humor that I couldn’t have explained, even to you. I heard the words the too-solicitous Lady Morange said to you as she left, as I’m sure she’d meant me to. Rest, sleep, she said, when what I wanted to do was run—out of the palace, out of New Sérène. But, to where?

And that was the problem. One of them, anyway.

I have never hidden myself from you. When you sighed and looked at me like I was one problem on your own list, I gave you back everything that was pent up in me. “What now,” I asked, not bothering to restrain my tone, my hands, my feelings, “are you going to scold me as well?”

“No, no, no…I’m just relieved to see you’re still alive!”

I let out the breath that had gotten caught somewhere behind my ribs. “I’m quite relieved myself, actually.” The thought of what you must have done to bring me back, and the way you stood there now, letting me snap at you, put me to shame. You are the last person in the world I should feel anger toward, no matter my circumstances.

“…Thank you, fair cousin,” I said. Those should have been the first words out of my mouth. “Without you I would be dead…thrice, wouldn’t I? Or is it the fourth time? –If we start counting the time you stopped me from climbing the ramparts of Sérène, we’d be up to five times now!” I suddenly found myself unable to keep still under your scrutiny, and I paced aimlessly, avoiding your eyes. Not too long ago, the words would have made you laugh, and things between us would have gone back to the way they’d always been. But now…

When you said, “It’s unbelievable…,” and still that troubled look was on your face, I had to physically restrain myself from speaking. Nothing good would have come of it.

“You feel no pain whatsoever, and your complexion…”

That shocked me out of the turmoil of my thoughts. “I haven’t even taken a look at myself,” I replied. “Is the improvement visible?”

“I wouldn’t go that far.” The way your voice changed told me that I would need to find a mirror, and soon. “–How is it that…,” you started, and only then you came closer, “What happened?”

“Don’t make that face. It’s merely a major miracle. Come on now”—come back to me—“I’m going to tell you everything.”

***

Privacy does not exist in this room.

I would have talked with you about this another way. I would have taken you to the stone circle, and maybe there you would have felt some of what I felt that night. We could have been Constantin and Lily, instead of the legate and the wayward governor.

Instead I found myself speaking to an audience as your companions gathered around, and I skimmed over the surface of things by habit. I had been performing my role of governor in front of strangers for so many weeks now, I no longer had to weigh what I wanted to say against what I should, what would give us the advantage. I knew my lines. It was all a show: say to Hikmet and to San Matheus that I am fine; the governor has returned to New Sérène, and though his face may be a sight, he seems otherwise to be in good health, in miraculously good health. The rabbit is still kicking; he is not a meal for us today.

Tell those foxes I am well—that was what I thought when I looked at Bishop Petrus and the savant, Aphra.

But you were looking at me as though you’d pull off my mask, and I realized that you weren’t listening so much to what I was saying as how I was saying it. “But I can see from your face that you know this already,” I said.

“Indeed,” was your reply. What a distant word. “Once on the ritual site I followed your tracks and deduced what had happened.”

It was harder to evade your questions. You seemed to have become more yourself in all this time we had been on Tir Fradi. You were more confident, a woman who owned her mind and who was capable of acting on her decisions. What a frightening thing for the old foxes guarding their dens. But I would never have thought that you’d speak that way to me. What secrets did I have from you?

“But aren’t you happy that he let me live?” I asked. I was being shameless; I knew it. But I would be that and more if it made you remember me.

“Don’t speak foolishly,” you said. You shifted on your feet and frowned, and I wondered what you were thinking that you weren’t going to tell me. “Of course. I just want to understand.

“—Tell me more about this ritual. What did it consist of?”

If I had thought my question would end the interrogation, I had been wrong. I sat back in my chair. I found myself considering what I would say to you, and finally I settled on nothing more than the academic answer. “It is, I think, a ritual the _doneigada_ practice to bind themselves to the island.”

“ _Doneigada_? Catasach taught you their language?”

“Just a few words. He wanted me to learn, to understand. But we had so little time.”

When you didn’t speak, I continued. I don’t have your gift for finding the heart of things and putting it into words, but I wanted to…I hoped to explain not just what had happened but how I felt changed, completely. If there was anyone who would understand, even in the face of the impossibility of it, even in the middle of this setting we’d created to tell ourselves that the new world was nothing different from the old, it would be you. You had changed on this island, too. I caught Síora glancing at you while I spoke. She understood something of what I was saying, but I could see how it unsettled her. And another detail became clear for me. By healing me, Catasach had done something that shouldn’t have been done. That was why the man who’d attacked us had killed him. 

But I couldn’t speak of that to you, not like this. “And now I am _on ol menawi_ , like you,” I finished. “Even if the malichor left me a few of its marks.” You glanced at my face again, confirming it.

“But you had to encounter the god of the island, didn’t you?” I asked as the thought occurred to me. “How was _en on mil frichtimen_?”

“Yes, I passed a trial for that,” you answered. I could hear the defeat in your voice, and in that moment I forgave you for your distance and the questions. “But the only one who could guide me to the sanctuary is dead. –Only the high king can open the sanctuary, according to Glendan. I have no choice but to return to see him. I am certain they are going to name a successor.”

“Are you saying that man—Vinbarr, is that what you called him? He was the high king of all the _Yecht Fradi_ , all the clans?”

“He was. Everyone I spoke to said that he had been missing for months before he attacked you.”

Added to all the impossibilities—attacked and abducted by a king who might have come straight out of an old and dusty myth. I supposed I should have been flattered to find myself suddenly so important. “–What an epic mess,” I said, meeting your eyes, and you answered me with a humorless smile that said those were exactly your thoughts on the subject.

***

I had been avoiding looking at myself for weeks, since the first time I saw veins of black blood crawling up my throat. Days after that, the disease had taken my sight, and I hadn’t had to worry about accidently catching a glimpse of the corpse I was becoming.

After you left, I went up to my room and stood in front of the mirror. And then I understood another reason for your distance. How could you not distance yourself when I looked the way I did? The malichor had indeed left its mark on me, a tracery of black under my skin, even though all other signs of the disease were gone. And the ritual—where I might have expected to see the mark of my bond, like yours, on my neck and jaw, instead it covered my entire face and my neck like a net woven of fine roots. My lips were blackened and rough. My eyes, too, had changed and now were ghostly pale. Branches as thin as twigs ringed my brow, coming up through my hair. When I took off my gloves, the skin on my hands had changed, too. I rubbed a thumb over my uninjured palm, and my skin was uneven and coarse, catching at the pad of my thumb like unfinished wood might.

I knew what I would see when I removed the coat and waistcoat I wore and pulled my shirt over my head, but I had to see it anyway. The marks covered me from my shoulders to my waist, and lower it looked like. I was becoming the monster that the king had accused me of being.

And I thought, what did it mean?

Then—why would you ever touch me again?

***

When you’ve been named a monster and you have the appearance of a monster, can you avoid becoming a monster?

We might have been able to have a debate on that question, Vinbarr and I.

By the end of that afternoon, I knew I had to get out of the palace; it was only a matter of accomplishing it. I had been alternately stared at and avoided, whispered about and talked at as though I was still an invalid and too far gone to realize it. In between audiences, before the next petitioner arrived and I had to endure their efforts to make sense of me, I decided to take Lady Morange up on her offer. Let her put an acceptable face on the governorship while I—what? I hardly knew what I meant to do. Fix myself? Heal, when I felt better than I ever had?

Understand what had happened—I would start there.

When finally there were no appointments left, I got up to look out one of the windows in the receiving hall that stretched from floor to ceiling and framed all I could see of the world during these long, dragging days. I was composing the note to Lady Morange in my head when the door opened behind me, and I turned to see de Courcillon with a crow in his shadow.

Of course. Of course there would be more prodding and blood-letting and conjectures by men who hid their ignorance along with their faces. The only real surprise was that they had waited until I was awake. –If they had waited, the thought occurred to me; I would have to look for knife wounds later.

De Courcillon looked taken aback and faltered for just a moment when I greeted them both with a smile and open arms. The smile was genuine enough. I had decided to make the crow sing, and it was by far the happiest thought I’d had that day.

“Gentlemen!” I said. “Doctor—you are just in time. I have been trying to decide if I should give myself over to science or to faith. You can see”—I gestured toward my face—“I woke up in this strange condition with nothing to account for it. Perhaps you can solve this mystery for me.”

They had reached me by then, and the crow bowed his head and then studied me from behind the opaque eyes of his mask. “Your Highness,” he answered finally, his voice muffled by his long beak, “without examining you thoroughly I could not make—”

“But you are an educated man,” I interrupted him. “An educated man’s guess would surely bring some light to this.” He said nothing, and I added, “I can tell you exactly all of the events that led up to this transformation. I am sure I could guess at the ingredients of the potion I drank, and I remember the words of the ritual very well. –Ah, but the spell that was put on me to make me sleep, that I don’t remember. Perhaps there is a test that will tell you what effect _that_ had on me.

“Here—” I pulled the glove off my right hand, held it out to him so he could see the knife wound that was healing on my palm. “I have already made the cut for you.”

“Your Highness,” de Courcillon said, not quite reproaching me. He wanted to call me by my name, as though we were in his study and I was disrupting his lecture, but here I was the master.

“Let the doctor answer, Professor. Then you can have a guess.”

The silence stretched out like a string drawn so tight it would snap. Behind the masks they wore, both of them, they waited for me to be the one to break it and relieve them of their discomfort with some pretty words. But I had no pity for them.

Finally, the professor turned to look at the doctor, and I heard the man clear his throat to speak. “Your Highness,” he started, “it is certainly possible that the potion you drank included some substance whose powers we do not know—”

“But what of the ritual? And the sleep that I was under?”

“…The answer will be in the chemistry, Your Highness.” 

How he clung to his dogma! I glanced away from him toward the window before I replied in an attempt to hide my smile, but the larger part of me did not care if he saw that I laughed at him. “But you have no answer,” I said, looking back into those empty eyes. “I am forced to conclude that no matter how much blood I donate to the cause, science will not have any answers for me. You have all the thanks you deserve from me, Doctor, but I will try faith this time.

“I’ve decided to leave matters here in Lady Morange’s care and go to San Matheus,” I told de Courcillon. He opened his mouth to speak, but I would not let him gainsay it. “The missionaries have been investigating the rituals of the islanders,” I continued over the protest that never left his throat. “Perhaps they have some insights to share.

“Gentlemen,” I said, putting an end to the conversation. They bowed, as protocol demanded, and said nothing, as my rank demanded. And like that I was free. “Do not worry for my safety, de Courcillon,” I said over my shoulder as I left them. “I will make all the necessary arrangements.”

Within the hour, the letter to Lady Morange was in the hands of the palace steward, and I had paid the captain of my guard enough that he would remember that he had sent four of his men with me, even if _you_ were to question him, Cousin. He is a good man; you and de Courcillon chose well after the Guard’s attempt at a coup. But even good men have expenses.

Another purse of gold bought me the services and temporary loyalties of three men procured at the tavern—two brothers, citizens of the Congregation who made a living escorting nobles through the wilder parts of the island, and a former veteran of the Guard who had split with his faction to stay in New Sérène for reasons he did not care to reveal and I did not care to know. They did not ask questions and, as long as I had the gold to pay them, they answered to no one but me.

The next morning, for the second time, I left New Sérène in the back of a cart, beneath a hooded cape that hid my face from view. And the feeling when we left the walls of the city behind—it was more than relief and the anticipation of an adventure. As we drove toward the trees, it was as if a wind came off the forest and suddenly I could feel again, distantly, the stone circle at Couwis lying quiet beneath the trees and everything green and alive in the place where I’d made my bond.

***

If the doctors looked at me as though I was a perpetual experiment, the holy men, I was sure, would see me as proof that demons did exist and could trap any faithless man in their embrace. Do you think they would have burned me at the stake, Cousin, looking the way I did? That was a bet that I would not make, not with my life as the wager.

The brothers Thomas—they had told me their given names, but that was the name I gave them—knew of a stone circle to the north and east of San Matheus, closer to the heart of the island in the upland forests the islanders called Cwenvár, and that was where we went, leaving the cart behind when we had to leave the road. The experience of traveling through the wilderness was very different this time. The feeling that I’d had when we left New Sérène was undeniable proof that the ritual had happened and that it had changed me, and the bond was like another sense that fed all my others. When I felt the wind on my face, I felt the movement of the trees above my head as if the leaves were brushing my skin. If I turned my head the right way I could hear the bubbling churn of the waters in the swamps we had traversed in the morning. If I pressed my hand to the ground now or took off my boots to walk barefoot, I wondered if even the earth would feel alive.

It hadn’t been long after we’d landed on the island that I had realized my dream of Tir Fradi had been only that, a dream, and that the reality was something altogether too like the old world. –Why had we done that? Why had we decided that the new world must be like the old when, gods knew, we couldn’t call ourselves the pinnacle of anything? The old world was dying; it had been dying as long as I’d been alive.

But walking through the forest now with nothing more than an old canvas satchel on my shoulder and the pistol and knife at my belt, I remembered the anticipation that I’d carried with me on the ship from Sérène. This—making a new path with every step—this was what the dream of Tir Fradi had been like, and now I had it. And if I could understand the change the island had wrought in me, perhaps I could keep it.

We weren’t far from the circle, but the brothers would not go there at night. That was when the islanders came for their rituals. We made camp in a protected hollow that had no signs of beasts, and Thomas the elder put a small kettle over the fire to boil water. They didn’t drink out in the wild, the brothers Thomas—fast way to get yourself eaten, Thomas the elder explained when he put a cup of an unfamiliar drink in my hand. It was something like tea, Thomas the younger explained when I raised the cup to smell the steam that was coming off it, but the natives brewed it with the seeds of a small tree that were dried in the sun for weeks, roasted over a fire, and then crushed. It heightened the senses, instead of dulling them like wine or spirits. Otto, our former Guardsman who had the same name as my old sparring partner—and the same right hook, judging by the size of his arms—took a swallow and only raised his eyebrows, which told me nothing. The drink was bitter, I found, when I put the cup to my lips, but despite that, I had drunk it off entirely almost before I’d realized it. And, before I’d realized it, we were talking like old friends met again in the tavern, and I felt human for the first time since I’d looked in the mirror.

When I say “we,” I mean myself and the brothers Thomas. Otto wasn’t much for talking, but even our dour-faced Guard was made companionable by whatever strange brew we were drinking. His lips twitched with a smile occasionally at some remark Thomas the younger made, and I would swear I heard him laugh once. He had brought a small piece of wood out from his pack and was working it with a short knife, turning it adeptly in his calloused hands as we sat and talked by the fire. He’d shaped it into what looked like a cross-guard for a child’s wooden sword and was carving into the sides a design of the big bear-like creatures called Ulgs with their huge curved teeth. “For my boy,” he said, when he glanced at me out of the corner of his eye and caught me watching him.

Later I lay on my bedroll by the fire, watching sparks drift over my head when a log broke and the distant stars. Almost without thinking about it, I reached out to touch the ground we had cleared closer to the fire and felt a shock of connection, one body to another. It was slight, but it shook me like touching a lover for the first time. More than that even. I slept very little that night but lay awake, all my body enthralled.

***

The morning was clear and the sun already warm when we found the stone circle in a small meadow hidden in the forest. The stones were carefully tended; there were recent offerings there, baskets filled with berries, dried meat, jewelry of carved obsidian stone strung on leather cords. The forest surrounding the place was full of tall old trees that shaded the meadow, and across from the path I’d taken to come into the circle stood a giant, a tree twice as tall as the others and as wide as a city street. It must have been hundreds of years old. It seemed to grow from an outcropping of stone; its roots were massive and looked like they might break the stone beneath them.

The others had taken up positions to keep watch while I went into the circle alone with a cup in one hand, my knife in the other, and only the vaguest idea of what to do. One of the carved stones, the one set before the giant tree, lay on the ground on its face like an altar. I went to stand in front of it. I had filled the cup with water from a spring we’d passed earlier, but there had been other things in the potion Catasach had given me to drink, something that had a scent like tree bark, I remembered. But I had no way to know the recipe, or what might be the crucial ingredients. With nothing else at hand, I took a few berries from one of the baskets and crushed them to add their juice to the cup. I drank, then knelt on my knees before the stone and put the knife against my palm. I made the cut over the last one, bearing down until blood welled up around the blade.

Somehow I still remembered the words. I heard them in Catasach’s voice as I spoke them again, pressing my bloody hand into the grass at the base of the stone.

Nothing—I felt the bond the same way I’d felt it since we left New Sérène, but there was no surge of energy and life like I’d felt the first time, when Catasach had led me stumbling through the ritual. I was missing something, I realized. Catasach—I needed someone to speak the other words, someone to speak for me. This wasn’t something that could be done alone.

I hadn’t moved, and while my thoughts were mired in the impossibility of what I was trying to do, I became aware of—I don’t know what to call it exactly, so much of this can’t be captured by words—a _presence_ , like the intelligence of the _Nádaig_ , but boundless, existing in and around everything in the forest. It was watching me.

It was holding understanding just out of my reach.

I reached for it, not with my hands but with my awareness. Without thinking how to do it, I became the grass and the trees, the birds, the beasts. I became the _Nádaig_ , waiting in the forest. I might have lost myself forever there—perhaps I would have turned to stone, or into a guardian myself. But even when I was in the soul of all things, I was aware that I was myself; I was the one searching. And that was what brought me back—empty-handed, I thought at first.

I came back to myself, and my body was shuddering. I had to rest my forehead against the stone in front of me until the shaking stopped and I could breathe. And between one breath and the next I felt the power of the bond again, that feeling of being limitless, of existing in everything around me, of the rightness of things. It was as if I had not only four limbs but thousands and a body that was more vast than all that I could see.

There was a shout from one of the men—“My lord!” I raised my head to see the _Nádaig_ clinging to the roots of the giant tree with clawed hands and feet. It was the same as the guardian that Vinbarr had brought with him to attack Catasach and me and the men who had tried to rescue us, a towering, winged creature with branches radiating from its alien face. It leapt down into the clearing and spread its wings, looking down at me from its full height. Then I saw the difference in this guardian; its skin was blackened, as if it had been caught in a fire, and a dark cloud was coming off it, like ash.

“Back away!” said one of the brothers. I could hear them drawing their guns and the hammers clicking home.

“No. Don’t shoot. –Don’t move,” I said, keeping my eyes on the _Nádaig_ ’s face. “It won’t hurt us.” I said it and knew it was true. I could feel that great heart as if it beat in my chest, the strength in those limbs. I could command all that strength, if I reached out for it. 

The _Nádaig_ sidled in a crouch to the fallen stone and grasped the end of it opposite to where I stood, and then I did back away a step as it raised the stone, lifted it clear off the ground, and let it fall. The ground shook under that hammer blow; the stone stood upright, the _Nádaig_ waiting beside it. 

I looked down at my hand. Blood streaked my palm, starting to dry now, and still the marks were there. When I felt my throat and jaw, it was the same—no, not the same, my skin felt rougher than before. The weight of the branches on my head felt heavier. The ritual had only left me with the same questions—how had this happened, and why? What was I becoming? And I had no direction to go in now to seek the answers.

The _Nádaig_ grunted and spread its wings; I felt a shiver go through it. That was when I noticed the face in the stone. When the _Nádaig_ drew in its wings again, I saw behind it the eyes and features of a man’s face in the outcropping of rock, between the roots of the tree. It watched me. There was something in those eyes, the same presence I had felt after I’d attempted the ritual.

“Who are you?”

There was no answer, only the feeling of that vast regard. There was hostility in it.

I took several steps toward the face, passing the _Nádaig_ , which turned to keep me in its sight. “Why is this happening?” I asked the stone.

I told you that I felt changed. And along with that, the world had changed for me. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the rock moved, the hole that shaped the mouth opening and closing, but nothing happened. There was no answer. The presence was there and then, as silently and unsettlingly as it had arrived, it left me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I figured out while I was writing this chapter that this is the secret to writing Constantin: if he wants to do something outrageous or ridiculous, let him do it.


	3. God

__

_I see a mountain at my gates_  
_I see it more and more each day_  
_And my desire wears a dark dress_  
_But each day I see you less_

I knew I loved you the day of the coup. When you stepped in front of the Guards, I thought I was going to see you killed, and instead I saw you magnificent.

You couldn’t have understood what I meant when I told you that I loved you. And I couldn’t say anything else to make you understand. What was the point? I was as good as dead.

I said I had no secrets from you, but that was one. The first one.

***

It was impossible to step on the smoking earth so close to the mouth of the volcano and not understand why the islanders worshipped it. Describing it in words is another matter—but I could feel that this was the place where all the cycles on the island ended and began. The volcano’s heart lay far beneath my feet, but it was so vast and so distant that nothing in me, not my mind, not this new sense the bond had given me, could encompass it. I waited until you had passed through the gate and the new high king had turned his back to go to the fire you’d made a little way off, and I followed you.

I know what you would have said if you’d caught me there. I heard you lecturing me in my thoughts as I climbed up the mountain behind you, looking for the tracks you and your companions had left in the mud between strange, black rocks that looked like boiling water made solid. Your voice in my head, even angry and worried as it was, might have been the only thing that kept me going when I felt so insignificant and close to death. Even the air in places was deathly to breathe; at times, I took a breath and felt like I was choking, drowning on dry land, until I found pockets of air that weren’t toxic.

It was an idiotic plan; I know. That was why I had left the brothers Thomas and Otto back at our camp. If anyone was going to die so that I could have answers, it should only have been me.

I was close enough to see a warm light through a crevice in the mountainside that moved and flickered like water or fire when the ground shook beneath me and there was a sound like rocks falling that seemed to come from inside the mountain. The eyes of the god were on me again, a gaze that meant to pin me to the rock and keep me there, away from his sanctuary. The force of it was enough to strip a man bare, leaving him with nothing of what he thought he was. My hand was shaking when I pulled my pistol from my belt, and I could only keep going by gripping the strange black rocks that walled in the path with my free hand and pulling myself along. There was no thought left in me, only defiance. The volcano and the power within it were telling me that I _would not_ , and everything left of me answered _I will_. The rocks tore first my glove and then my palm, I couldn’t fill my lungs, and I kept going.

Only a _Nádaig_ could have voiced the roar that seemed to make the earth shudder. When I glanced up, two guardians, each easily twice as large as the ones I’d seen before and with limbs that bent and moved strangely, were flowing towards me over the rocks with a speed and grace that shouldn’t have been possible, and was all the more terrifying for it. I came back to myself suddenly; I’d been watching my death coming toward me and admiring it. But there was nothing I could do to prevent it. A round from my pistol would not make such a creature even flinch.

I wasn’t thinking when I brought my free hand up in front of me, a flimsy shield, or when I reached out of myself and felt the bonds I’d created with the island. The vitality of green things and living creatures filled me like a breath. Even in the midst of the acrid air rising from the volcano, I could feel the soft humidity of the forest on my face.

The _Nádaig_ surged toward me, and I couldn’t look away from their huge eyes set in almost-human faces. Then, as if they hit a wall that repelled all the force of their onslaught, they reared up and twisted away, hissing furiously. I felt the reverberations when their clawed feet hit the ground again—or perhaps I only realized then that my legs were shaking. I leaned against the rock, and we watched each other, at an impasse. One of the _Nádaig_ had come down onto the path above me, blocking the way; the other circled, its huge claws scraping at the rocks with a sound that sent bolts down my spine. White sparks fell from their open, panting mouths.

I braced myself with my uninjured hand on my leg and kept the other raised toward the guardians. Whatever I was managing to do, it was keeping me alive. “Is this the only answer you’ll give me?” I asked, when I had enough breath to speak. The heaviness in the air had receded when the _Nádaig_ came, and I wondered if _en on mil frichtimen_ was watching me through their eyes. As I spoke, low growls rumbled in their chests like rocks tumbling together.

I spoke to them. “I want to live.” The words sounded like a weak plea, even as I said them. It had only been after I’d left New Sérène that I’d realized I couldn’t live in the old world any longer, not as I was. And along with that had come the realization that I didn’t want to go back. If I knew the way to take the marks from my skin so that I made sense again in the rational, rule-bound world we’d been born into, I wouldn’t do it. But here in Tir Fradi, where the rules were different and allowed impossible things—even here I was told that I was wrong, that I shouldn’t be.

There was no response coming; I knew that then. The _Nádaig_ were testing the air around me, reaching with clawed hands, thrusting their heads toward me before they were forced to turn away, making sharp cries of frustrated rage. When I started to back away down the path, feeling carefully each time before I set my foot down, they followed. If I turned, if I ran, whatever tenuous magic was keeping them off me would evaporate, and they would tear me to pieces.

I reached with my uninjured hand for the knife in my belt and, only half-believing that it would work, I put the blade to my other palm. I made the cut too quickly—blood poured down my wrist and soaked the fabric of my shirt and coat. But the magic of Tir Fradi seemed to be bound up in blood; I would make the sacrifice if it got me down from the mountain alive. I held my hand a little lower, so my blood fell on the earth, and I pictured in my mind the roots that Catasach had called. And in a moment I felt them come, a surging underground and a sudden release as three tendrils found the air and grew at a furious speed, reaching to twine around the legs of the _Nádaig_. They roared, white fire flaring in their throats, and reared up—but already I had flung drops of my blood across the path and pulled more roots from the ground. When I felt them catch on a leg or one of the spines growing from the guardians’ backs, I dragged the roots down and the guardians with them, holding them. I could hold them. But barely—the roots creaked as the wood started to stretch and snap. The roaring of the _Nádaig_ filled my ears, and the gaze of _en on mil frichtimen_ was on me again, so heavy the very ground seemed like it would collapse under the weight.

I turned and ran.

I heard a man shout when I ran, stumbling and holding my bleeding hand against my chest, through the tall stone gate. It was the new high king—but he didn’t follow me. You weren’t there. At the time the thought that something might have happened to you crawled in my gut like a physical thing. But now I know that I was fortunate to have made it out before you. How would I have answered for myself if you’d found me there?

It wasn’t the right time to tell you. This isn’t something that you—that anyone—could only hear and believe.

***

That night I asked the brothers to tell me where they had found other stone circles. I had decided to make my own answer to the question of my fate.

I would have to go back to New Sérène. We had stayed in our dark camp in the trees outside Dorhadgenedu until you came down from the mountain. Before dawn, we started the journey south to beat you back to the city, so I would be where you expected me when you came to tell me about your encounter with the god. I imagined it had been a very different encounter than my own. Thomas the elder tried to caution me against traveling in the wilds at night, but when I told him that I would go with or without them, he kept whatever objections he had behind a close-lipped frown and shouldered his bag. All three of the men kept their rifles in their hands while we walked. But I could feel the beasts in the forest, the Tenlans and the Vailegs hunting and Andrigs drowsing in their circles of sharp-tipped horns, and when I reached out with the new awareness I had through the bonds, I found I could turn them aside so they wouldn’t cross our path.

It was an unnaturally quiet journey for the brothers and Otto. For my part, I was beginning to understand the power I had drawn from the stone circles, what my mind could encompass, what I could do. I had never felt so free as I did during those days that we were on the trail. I no longer had to worry about what it all meant, and the only permission I needed was my own. It had always been that way; I just hadn’t realized it.

In the morning, we stopped at a stone circle on a rocky headland, near a river that plunged over the cliff and into a valley. Below lay the stone ruins of a city, one that must have been built by the Congregation during our nation’s first attempt to colonize the island and later destroyed, by a _Nádaig_ or perhaps only time. By the looks of the place, both would be equally effective. But there was life in the ruins. I spent some time sitting at the edge of the falls, watching the islanders at their cook fires and coming and going between their round houses before I unwound the bandage on my injured hand and went to the bonding stone.

“What is the purpose to all this, my lord?” Thomas the younger finally asked, after the _Nádaig_ had come and lifted the stone. This guardian had tentacles hanging from its face and the shell of a sea creature on its back; its body was covered with spikes like a living morningstar and plates of a hard material like armor. The skin of this one, too, was blackened, and that substance like ash was coming off of it. There was a feeling of heaviness, of imbalance about it, a pull, like I had the _Nádaig_ tied at the end of a rope. I was pulling her out of her natural place.

But I couldn’t regret it. Let _en on mil frichtimen_ watch, I thought; let god watch from his mountain and worry over what I might do.

I had washed the blood from my palm and was wrapping my abused hand again in clean cloth. The brothers Thomas and Otto were sitting on the rocks outside of the circle, Thomas the younger watching me, the others watching the _Nádaig_. When Thomas the younger asked the question, his brother and Otto turned to look at me.

I finished bandaging my hand before I answered. I couldn’t fault him for asking. It was a fair question, one they all must have been asking themselves since they’d seen me stand unarmed in front of a guardian in the first stone circle.

I answered it with the truth. “I’m going to become a god on this island,” I said. The brothers shared a wordless glance, and Otto looked down at his empty hand resting on his lap and made a noise in his throat that might have been a scoff or a rumble of concern. Let them think I was speaking nonsense or metaphors. Let them believe it, even. I didn’t care. Who would believe them if they spoke of it? By this time next week, I fully intended that half of New Sérène would think I had gone mad—and the other half neither knew nor cared who their governor was or what he did as long as he didn’t take the bread off their tables. I felt a thrill at saying aloud what I had resolved in my mind to do. Below the level of thought, I felt the watchfulness of the _Nádaig_ and the weight of the standing stones in the soil that had anchored them for lifetimes.

It was possible, all of it.

***

In the three days before you returned to New Sérène, I dedicated myself to the task of confirming for Sir de Courcillon that his worst fears and the worst fears of my father were pallid, tame tales in comparison to the depths of delinquency I was truly capable of. Lady Morange, for the most part, continued to sit in the governor’s throne in my stead, because I was proving more unreliable by the hour. I left the palace every night and did not return until well after dawn. I came into the receiving hall abominably late, smelling of drink, or not at all. I was seen walking in broad daylight in the alleyways of the city in my shirtsleeves with a courtesan on each arm. (There was one palace courtesan that I liked, Gretchen, a new “hire” of sorts—and, if I’m right, you had something to do with that, Cousin. After she lost her nerves around me, she called me her little shrub, and whenever I said something outrageous to a proper lord or lady passing by on the street, she would be right there with me, loudly playing the haughty aristocrat with her country accent. If I had anything like a partner in the destruction of my fragile reputation, it was her.)

At night, I left the city alone to find stone circles in Glendgnamvar and Wenshaganaw. And I found something else, an old, empty cache in the hills above New Sérène that must have been used when we first began to settle here—or perhaps even earlier than that. It was a large cave, with barred compartments to keep valuables safe from beasts or the islanders. Islanders had been there at some point; they had left strange icons and carvings deeper in the cave. The place did not have the same feel as a stone circle, though, that undercurrent of potential that I was beginning to recognize at a distance. It might have been an old tomb, or simply a shelter for travelers. I left most of my notes there to keep them away from prying eyes, and from there, outside the city, I practiced tapping into the bonds I had made with the island, reaching out to the _Nádaig_ and the simpler beasts, urging them in the directions I wanted them to go. I left my men there, too, to guard the place. There was nothing on the island that threatened me now—except perhaps the _Nádaig_ guarding the volcano sanctuary. I would need to gather more strength before I could truly measure myself against _en on mil frichtimen_.

When you finally appeared in the receiving hall, I was sitting in the governor’s throne and happy to be there for the first time in weeks. Delegations from the Alliance and the poisonous snakes of the Guard had just arrived to beg our aid in beating back the native beasts that were throwing themselves at their outposts, night after night. The island itself seemed to be rising up against them.

You know now that I was the one behind all the violence. And I know you’ll judge me for that. –But think, Cousin, our ventures on this island were always going to end in violence, just the way they began. The only difference is in who the winners will be.

Your sense of timing is truly eerie. You came just in time to offer yourself to our ally and even our would-be killers, and I couldn’t do a thing to stop it without giving my act away. The act was everything. I needed you to wonder, to guess, but it was still too soon for you to know what I was about. You were the only one who might have talked me out of it.

After our guests were escorted out, you told me about your encounter with _en on mil frichtimen_. I was so surprised that for a moment I forgot the role I was playing. A tree! Surely a god could choose his shape—why a tree? What a dull existence. I had been imagining some great confrontation with the god in my head, once I could finally enter the sanctuary. But perhaps all I needed was an ax and a matchstick.

 _En on mil frichtimen_ had spoken to you. He had spoken to you to warn you about me.

My first feeling when you carefully repeated what the god had said was anger-- _en on mil frichtimen_ was trying to turn you against me. Did he think he could make you his weapon? And my first instinct was to deny all of it.

***

If I told you that the hardest part of all of this was being apart from you, would you believe me? –And not just being apart from you, but feeling the distance between us grow when you were standing there right in front of me.

“Do you have anything else to tell me?” I asked when you finished your report.

“No, that was all I learned,” you replied, but the look on your face betrayed your troubled thoughts. You shared that look with your grounded sea captain, though, not with me. And would you share those thoughts with him, later?

And had you taken him to bed?

I got up from the throne. I couldn’t stay in the room with that image in my head. “I’ll leave you to get ready then,” I said as I left the dais. “Look out for yourself, Cousin.”

The guard let me through the door leading up to the third floor, but I was only halfway up the stairs to the first landing when the door opened again. “‘Adorable’ cousin?” I heard you ask behind me.

“Are you questioning it?” I stopped, but I didn’t turn. “You may be a hero and a monster killer now, Cousin, but you are undeniably adorable.”

You stepped onto the stairs, and then I did turn to look down at you. That distance that I hated was my shield then. If you had gotten close enough, I might have told you everything. But as it turned out, I didn’t need to worry about that. You stayed at the bottom of the stairs, holding the banister like you would anchor yourself there, and when I turned, your eyes looking up at me were so unhappy.

“Constantin, are you trying to push me away?”

“No,” I answered. “No, not at all. –As I recall, I gave you permission to stay here. Hikmet has an army of its own. And as for the Coin Guard, if they are all eaten by beasts, we should open the best bottles in the cellar and celebrate. You’ve told me a little about Cornelia’s soirees; I’m sure she’d be keen.”

I’ve always known when I was pushing you. Before we’d come here, I was always sure that I could jest or outright beg my way back into your affections. Now I watched your expression grow brittle and, just like when you had first seen me after the ritual, I wasn’t sure where I stood with you.

You let me evade the question—we both knew it and pretended it hadn’t happened—and asked instead, “How have they reacted? To your face.” Your hand came up, and your gloved fingers touched the mark on your jaw.

My lips twisted in a way that was something like a smile. “Oh, they whisper behind their hands and when my back is turned. I think they’re relieved, actually. All this time, I haven’t been living up to expectations; I’ve been too well-behaved. –Don’t worry about me, Cousin. You know I don’t mind being infamous.”

“When this is over, I’ll go back to the _tierna harh cadachtas_. She may be able to help us understand what happened when Catasach bound you to the island.”

“But _en on mil frichtimen_ speaks to her, doesn’t he? What if she repeats what he told you? She may want me gone as much as her god does.”

You looked away, and I watched your hands come up to your waist, the way you used to clasp them together when you were anxious, before you forced them down. You settled with one hand on the hilt of your saber and the other in a fist at your side.

“I’ll find out what’s at the heart of this, I promise you,” you finally said, meeting my eyes again. “It has to be a misunderstanding.”

“Yes,” I said. “It must be. …You know I have total faith in you, Cousin.”

You were the last one to realize we were at war and the last one to see your part in it. And I knew the longer I stayed with you, the more likely it would be that I would say something that would give everything away too soon. I started up the stairs again and left you to go face the army I had made. There was no going back now. You’d find the answers that you were chasing—and I could only hope they were the same answers that I had found.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I survived Chapter 3!
> 
> Usually I let a chapter sit for at least a day before I go back in to clean it up and post it. This one I basically put in time out for a week, and I felt a lot better about it when I went back in to edit it yesterday. If you're having trouble writing anything, leaving it alone and coming back to it with fresh eyes always helps.
> 
> Also, I have no idea what the plural form of Nadaig is. I've seen it written as Nadaiges, which doesn't feel right to me, and I haven't been able to verify that anywhere. So I'm going with Nadaig as the plural for now, and I'll fix it if I find out it's something else. Constantin doesn't know what it is, either; so really, we're all good.


	4. The Mountain

__

_Oh, when I come to climb_  
_Show me the mountain so far behind_  
_Yeah, it’s farther away_  
_Its shadow gets smaller day after day_

The _Nádaig_ lay dying from a hundred wounds that pierced the natural armor of her hide, and I came back to myself in the cave, sitting with my back against one of the slabs of stone that served as a table. For a moment, I was the guardian still, dragging in my last breaths and remembering people like the people who stood over her now with weapons drawn and bloody, but the others had bowed to touch the earth before her and left offering bowls full of all the fruits of the river and sea. Then I felt only myself whole and unharmed, and I knew that the guardian had died.

But you were still alive. I had told the _Nádaig glendemen_ not to harm you, and she had listened. –But saying “told” and “listened” doesn’t convey the truth of it. I was in the _Nádaig_ when you fought, and because I loved you, she loved you. Seeing you dead would have been worse than death for both of us.

That was the second time I’d felt death at your hands.

I turned my head and rested my temple against the stone for a moment until I felt the cold seeping into me, and then sat up stiffly to reach for my notes. I was learning to split my consciousness, or attempting to. If my plans progressed, I would need to control the _Nádaig_ guarding the mountain sanctuary at the same time I was completing the ritual to bind myself to the heart of the volcano. They were the greatest spirits on the island, aside from _en on mil frichtimen_ himself. I was under no delusion that it would be easy. I still saw the white fire in their throats sometimes when I closed my eyes.

Even so, when I look back on it now, those days when I was pitting myself against you were days that I felt I could say that I’d lived. I barely slept, I don’t remember eating, but I had all the energy I could want and more. My body was changing into the body of a man who’d lived a life that had given him reason to use his muscles—not my life, for a surety! My habitat had always been a palace or a tavern, and both were too soft to demand anything of muscle.

I wanted to laugh about it with you when I tripped over my own feet and, once, when I ripped the seams all down the back of my coat when I tried to shrug it on over shoulders that had grown too broad. I’d grown like a weed overnight, or like the way I’d grown when I was fourteen and suddenly one day we’d noticed that I was taller than you. But eventually, after I’d walked miles in this body, it began to feel like it belonged to me, or like I belonged in it. And I began to wonder what you would think, now that I looked so different, and what it would be like to be with you, alone.

The mirror saved me whenever I started to believe too much in that fantasy. The reflection of my face was all the reminder that I needed of how I must look in your eyes.

***

This endeavor captivated me like nothing else had ever done. There was risk in it, but I knew that I was capable of overcoming it. And I was impatient. I was so impatient for you to know, almost to the point of forgetting my plan entirely.

Perhaps that was why I underestimated you and let you get too close.

***

I felt a strange kinship with the _Nádaig magamen_ that I called out of the trees in Vedrad. Perhaps he was younger, newly transformed, and remembered more of what it had been like to be a man. When he emerged from the forest, I could feel a swagger about him and pride in the way he carried himself. If I had been an old man and transformed in the dim twilight of my life into one of the great guardians of the island, I might have felt the same way. He pushed the stone upright, wrapped his arms around and lifted it, then let it fall to seal the bond. And when it was done, he peered at me from behind the mask that his kind wore. He did not fight me. But when our minds joined, I could sense his attempts to understand something he’d never seen before.

I saw you through his eyes first, when he startled as you came into the circle with Síora and Vasco, and I put out my hand automatically to hold him back. The surprise I felt at seeing you there tore through me, and when I turned to face you, I felt the _Nádaig_ stand to his full height behind me, eager, ready for the threat.

“Constantin, what are you doing?” Your expression was so troubled when you looked at me. I know what you saw. I had been feeling the other changes, too, since the day I had bound myself in Cwenvár. Each day that I returned to the palace, I studied myself in the mirror, wondering if that would be the day that someone—Sir De Courcillon, Lady Morange, a servant with more sense than caution—would call me out for the monster that I was. In one way, I was healthier than I ever had been. But my face, my skin… I looked like death walking, or more like a _Nádaig_ than a man, with my marked skin, pale eyes, and the branches that were growing from my head so fast I could almost see the change from one moment to the next.

But what else had you seen? The beasts I’d sent to kill the islanders who’d seen me come this way? Their bodies? I knew how it all would look to you.

What could I do but hope that you would still see me behind this face and my actions? I could feel Síora’s gaze on me like she would force the truth out of my mouth, but I couldn’t spare a glance for your companions. You were the only one who mattered. “Fair cousin! You’re here!” I said. I chanced a few steps toward you, and felt a little hope when you did not back away. “I—I would have preferred that you learn all of this another way. To be able to reveal everything to you in better circumstances… But whatever power we earn, there are some things that escape us.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, but what are you doing here?”

“I seem monstrous to you. I am well aware of that,” I said, and there was no way that I could have mastered the fervor that rose in my voice in response to the coolness of your tone. It had always been that way between us. “But I promise to explain everything when the moment is right. Then you will understand. You will see.” My breath was ragged when I let it out. “The temptation is so great to share all with you right now! You have done so much for me; you have given me so much. I haven’t forgotten, believe me!

“But I still have more to do. –Forgive me, and have patience,” I said, backing away from you. If I could have taken you with me, I would have. But I could see the doubt in your face. I know what you were thinking. You had spoken to a god; you could not doubt the existence of _en on mil frichtimen_ , or his power. But you could, and you did, doubt me. And why wouldn’t you? Why would you believe that I would try to become a god, or that I could? I had to strip every specter of doubt away before I could hope to convince you.

Forgive me. Please, forgive me.

“Hold them back,” I said to the _Nádaig_ as I turned to leave. “But do not kill her for anything in the world.” I felt the ferocity rising in him when I gave him the freedom to drive off the intruders on his land. I couldn’t fully control him and still walk, but I kept part of my awareness on him like a tether as I put as much distance between us as I could. If I had to, I would kill him myself to keep you alive.

As I left the circle, I heard the _Nádaig_ give voice to a warning growl. You must have tried to follow me, as I’d known you would. You wouldn’t have let me go willingly, once you’d found me like this.

And I did hear your voice following me. “Constantin! Come back and explain yourself!”

But after that, there was only the sounds of battle, becoming more distant as the trees closed around me, and the pride, fierce and unrelenting, of the _Nádaig_ , even after he was wounded and his formidable strength began to fail. He would die. He must die—to buy the time that I needed.

***

My thoughts toward you…aren’t what they should be.

My thoughts toward you aren’t what they should be—but what does it matter? We were never related by blood.

***

I knew I had to climb the mountain again soon. Coming back to New Sérène days later to find my men and the beasts I’d left to guard the cache all dead and my notes disturbed only confirmed it for me. You would be taking actions to keep me from the sanctuary, and I could only guess at what those might be. I had days at most.

I buried the brothers Thomas and Otto in the cave under cairns of stone—stones that rolled into the cave and piled themselves one atop the other when I called them—and I left the little wooden sword that Otto had finished and polished to a shine standing point down at the head of his grave.

I was still there when I felt a strange numbness, not in a limb but in a direction, north and east, near the heart of the island. A moment ago if I had reached out, I could have inhabited the tall, straight pines in Frasoneigad and the shadows underneath. It wasn’t the same as seeing; sight misses so much. It was a deeper way of _knowing_ than anything else. But now—nothing. There was nothing for me to reach for.

This was how it started, then. You were there, and the islanders were helping you. Who else would know a way to undo what I’d done?

I would have to leave that night if I was going to beat you to the mountain.

***

The parlor outside my bedroom was so dark that I did not see the shadow sitting in one of the armchairs by the fire until he spoke. “Constantin?”

“Professor.” I was surprised for only a moment; I had been expecting something like this for weeks, after all. Sir de Courcillon started to get up, but I gestured him back into his chair as I came to stand with one hand resting on the back of the chair opposite him. “No need, Professor. Sit.”

De Courcillon looked down at a small packet of letters he held in one hand and rubbed his thumb across the one on top. The firelight cast shadows in the lines of his face as he frowned. Our old professor was hesitant, or perhaps even nervous, I realized. That wasn’t like him; normally he had no trouble at all scolding me.

“Constantin, I have written to Bishop Augusta at San Matheus, one of the Mother Cardinal’s advisors. The reply I received from her says that you were never seen at court—or anywhere in that city.”

“Did your bishop inquire at the tavern?” I asked, before I could think better of it. There was something about provoking the old man that promised to release some of the tension that had been bound up in me since you had found me in the stone circle.

He looked up at me sharply, but his eyes met mine for only a moment before he glanced away, at the branches growing a foot over my head, then back at the fire. “I have not been able to discover from your guards where you’ve been going,” he said, “only that you are gone more often than not, and you forbid any of them to follow you.

“Constantin.” Now he pushed himself up from the chair and met my eyes. “It is plain even to this old man’s sight that you’ve stumbled across one of the mysteries of the island. I fear that what is happening to you, this transformation, is beyond any of our understanding—and it very well could be a threat to your life.

“Please,” he continued, before I had found the words to reply. I had not expected this concern from him. “Confide in De Sardet; I beg you. Your cousin is nearly sick with worry over your behavior.”

“Is she?”

“She has not spoken with me.” A crease appeared in the packet of letters as De Courcillon tensed, then he let his hand fall to his side. He looked away, toward the fire. “When I see her, she is pale and distracted. Bishop Petrus tells me that she barely sleeps, and only stops to rest at all because her companions are with her.”

I let my eyes linger on the wavering light and shadows on the brick at the back of the fireplace along with him. Selfishly, I wanted De Courcillon to say more. I was ready to grasp hold of any sign that you still cared for me after everything; I would delude myself with that hope for as long as I could. I didn’t notice that the professor was watching me until he spoke again. “Is there something the matter between you?” he asked. “This distance isn’t like either of you.”

I straightened. When I looked at him, Sir De Courcillon had an expression on his face that was carefully composed, concerned but not overly so. Inviting. He wanted me to confide in him. I have spent too much time around diplomats, Cousin—there is always something behind the face of a question.

I told him what he wanted to hear, a little of it, in any case. “I will speak with her,” I said, and it had the added benefit of being true. All of this meant nothing if I did not have the chance to speak with you. “I fully own the blame in this, Professor. I’ve been keeping my cousin at a distance.”

“Ah,” said the old man. “It is certainly understandable. But, my young student—you are still my student in some ways, Constantin—you are doing yourself and your cousin a great disservice. You know you can place your trust in De Sardet without reservation. It is rare to find that trust in another person, especially for a member of a royal house. And it is a gift that should not be squandered.”

“You are right, Professor,” I replied. “And I do know the value of it.”

He nodded, and with that we both felt the conversation coming to its natural end. “Do let your old professor know if there is anything he can do for you,” he said. They were words I had heard him say to you many times, but he had never spoken them to me. Had I all of a sudden become acceptable to our professor? Even with all the evidence I’d seen of miracles, I had a hard time believing it.

“Go to bed, Professor,” I said. “It’s late, and tomorrow will be busy.”

He started to raise his hand, to place it on my arm or shoulder, perhaps, but then bowed instead. I waited in the parlor until he had crossed to the door that led to his bedroom and closed it behind him.

Honestly, Cousin, even after that reminder of how I was treating you, I almost laughed aloud when I reached my own room and realized that I had no reason to be there. I could not even remember why I had come back to the governor’s palace. I didn’t need anything, not clothing, not food or sleep. I wore my armor and my knife for the ritual. As for the rest—I did not need or want it. And now I had to wait for De Courcillon to stop stirring before I could creep through the parlor and out of the palace like I was seventeen again and desperate to get to a tavern.

I had asked the palace steward to reassign Albert almost two weeks ago. As my valet, he was too close to me, too likely to notice all the changes and my erratic behavior and say something. I was alone, and at first I was frustrated in this moment of forced quiet. I should have been out of the city by now.

But I thought of you, and then I knew, not why I had come, but what I had to do while I was here. I went to sit at the writing desk and found pen and paper, and I picked up one of Catasach’s little bowls that I had left there and held it in one hand while I wrote, turning it absentmindedly. The texture and weight of the stone was comforting in my palm. I must plan what I would say to you. I would only have one chance—and if _en on mil frichtimen_ had succeeded in turning you against me, I might only have moments.

I know you can see the same things that I do. You’ve run yourself ragged on this island fighting against everything the old world is, by nature—as if one woman could be a shield against the greed and conceit of an entire continent. If the old world has its way, Tir Fradi will be consumed parcel by parcel and spat out in cities and farm fields and mines. And the _Yecht Fradi_ will live like slaves in the old world or die in the new.

We are both caught between two worlds. You’ve barely thought about it. I know you, Cousin; you’ve tried not to. Thinking about it would mean questioning the loyalties you’ve held your entire life. You want to be what they want you to be. You want to do well at it.

But we don’t have to.

We don’t have to live by their rules—none of them.

We could be gods instead. We could be free.

***

That night between midnight and dawn, like the tide coming in, the beasts of the island felt me calling and began to migrate toward the mountain. I walked north through the dark forests of Vedrad beside Ulgs and Tenlans and sensed others ahead of us, fiercer beasts from the inland forests flowing up the mountain slopes. Many of the _Nádaig_ were dead. You and your companions have been fatal for them. But the ones that were left in the southern reaches of the island that I had visited were awake, watching, listening. They did not roam the bounds of their sacred places like they normally did but stood fixed, facing in my direction. I wouldn’t let them follow me. The _Nádaig_ had paid enough in blood already.

In Vigyigidaw, Vignamri, and a dozen other villages the _doneigada_ felt the pull as well and went sleepless. The bands of warriors you had called, from Hikmet, Tir Dob and other parts of the island, sat around their fires and listened to the wind that blew in from the sea and watched for the shine of eyes that appeared sometimes in the dark before winking out again.

For two days and nights, everything on the island seemed to catch its breath and wait. The winds were changing.

***

I am standing at the gate to Anemhaid, and I have to leave all thought of you behind me. At my back, the sun is just rising, and there is a mist coming off the ground, combining with the vapors of the volcano. I cannot see the path, just rocks that look as if they are floating on a cloud, but I don’t need to see it. I can hear a river of hisses and growls ahead of me as the beasts, my army, pass me one by one to go through the gate and up the mountain. And I can feel the heart of the sanctuary above and the presence there that watches and waits, watches and seethes.

This time, he keeps his _Nádaig_ close, but I reach out and find them clinging so tightly to the great tree—that I can almost see even from where I’m standing—that they seem like a part of it. When I call them, they shudder, roaring. They fight me in a way I’ve never felt before, wrenching their minds out of my control, and _en on mil frichtimen_ tries to hide them, flaring up in my awareness like a sun. But he is diminished. When I draw on the bonds and all the power that lives in the island, I know with certainty that I can eclipse him. He is old and has slept more often than not, and it is time for something new.

I don’t fight him. I don’t need to. When I call again, his guardians come, and I feel their minds, sharp and watchful, and ancient. If they had been human once, there is very little left in them that is human still. Their minds are almost like the god’s, and I know instinctively that they measure existence on a scale that I cannot comprehend. I have to spend more of myself than I wanted to bind them, and when I come back to my own body, I can feel sweat cooling on my skin.

The two guardians meet me at the crevice in the mountainside that leads to the heart of the god’s sanctuary. Their heads are nearly as long as I am tall, and when they put their faces close to the ground to examine me, I can’t help but feel a thrill of terror. For the moment, I’m still human. But I have to master myself, or I will fail. My fear is fraying the bonds, and _en on mil frichtimen_ is watching. I take a breath to steady myself. I take off my gloves—my hands are sweating and the leather sticks to my skin—and hold out my right hand, my palm raised, to the nearest guardian. The _Nádaig_ thrusts its face forward, pushing my hand back almost to my shoulder, and I feel skin as rough as bark under my palm and the heat coming off of the massive creature.

They follow me into the hollow heart of the mountain. It’s dark; the sun hasn’t risen high enough to shine its light here. But I can feel the space open up around me as I walk toward the tree, _en on mil fritchtimen_ , which must be the largest living thing that I have ever seen. Then there is light—blue light from the tree itself—and I see the faces in the trunk that look as though they’ve grown from the wood. Each one is larger than I am. The light travels along cords in the wood, or veins, like the marks that cover my skin. I feel the god’s power rising, and I reach for my own. There are places on the island that I can no longer feel, the circles where you severed my bond somehow. But what I have is enough. It has to be.

A roar rises around me, but it isn’t coming from the _Nádaig_. A storm wind tears through the sanctuary, starting nowhere and ending nowhere. I hear rocks clatter and fall and a groan almost deeper than sound as the tree’s branches bend under the force of it.

Dead leaves strike my face like knives, and I put up an arm to shield myself and shout into the wind, “Will you speak to me now?”

This time, there’s an answer.

“ _YOU WILL DESTROY EVERYTHING FOR YOUR PRIDE._ ”

I hear the voice of _en on mil frichtimen_ over the wind and I feel it in my chest, like the beat of a drum struck too close and too loudly.

“Pride! What pride did I have the first time I came here!”

“ _YOU TOOK FROM ME. YOU TAKE WHAT IS NOT YOURS, AND GIVE NOTHING IN RETURN._ ”

“Yes,” I say, without force. I don’t think the sound left my lips. “I will take what I need from you.” I have made myself an enemy of god, and this war between us will only end in death, mine or his. What he wants me to give—my life—is not something I will part with willingly.

I stretch my awareness and become the wind, battering at his power and the tree at its center. And the part of me that is in the storm gives into the strength and fury of it, the joy of it. This is the nature of a storm: to break down and reorder and scour all the old, dead things away. Distantly, I feel my body stumble. I’m falling to my knees. I am too many things, the _Nádaig_ , the beasts, and the storm, and I can’t hold them all. Distantly, I wonder if I’ve risked everything only to die here having accomplished nothing.

But then the god gives way. With nothing to oppose, the wind dissipates, and I go with it, back into my body on my hands and knees on the rocks. I reach for the _Nádaig_ with my awareness before I even try to lift my head and look. They are still bound to me; I feel them behind me, their hearts pounding and every muscle tensed.

It isn’t until I’m standing that I notice the change in the air. There are leaves and even small rocks rising from the ground, floating upward, as if gravity has become untethered. That substance that looks like ash, too, is rising off the ground, the _Nádaig_ , the tree itself, and there is a smell that is almost like something burning but not. It’s different, and I have no words to define it. When I walk forward, toward the offerings that have been left for the god closer to the roots of the tree, and draw my knife from my belt, I feel the air tugging at my arms and lifting my hair from my scalp.

“ _THE FLESH OF MY EARTH COMES. SHE WILL STOP YOUR MADNESS._ ”

The god speaks, and in the quiet after the words roll through me I sense it too, your footsteps on the sacred ground. The beasts I brought with me are already fighting the army you gathered, and in moments you’ll reach the battle.

I never wanted to be your enemy.

But it’s the only way. If you aren’t alone, if we don’t meet here, this ends differently. And that end is always my death—today or tomorrow, by your hand or mine. 

I want to live. With you.

“She isn’t yours,” I say, long moments later. I had almost forgotten that he had spoken, and perhaps the words are more a reminder to myself than anything. You aren’t mine, either, but I have always been yours.

There isn’t an altar here, but I reach a place in front of the tree’s trunk where grass is growing and kneel there. My right palm is covered in white scars and healing wounds, and I press the knife down across it again until my blood is running down the knife’s blade and onto the ground. I put my hand down, and when I say the words—“ _A ruicht neis diri, ades da ma rharmam_ ”—I feel a blast of heat. It seems to burn away the air around me, or perhaps I’m no longer in the air but underground, falling toward the heart of the volcano.

No—I’m in both places, stretching myself thinner and thinner, and I feel like I will break and be either a flare of fire underground or a man. But I hold together, one moment, then two. It’s a blink of time, or a thousand years—I can’t tell which. And while I’m molten rock and searing heat, I am also myself, and I feel the cool air and the open, empty space of the sanctuary against the back of my neck. There isn’t enough of me left to look for you on the battlefield, but every nerve in the part of me that is human is strained to sense you coming. And I think, over and over, like the words have some magic in them—

You know me.

Remember that you know me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all, the next story will be the last one in the series, but to me it feels like we're just getting to the real beginning. There's a lot more to come!
> 
> I've been trying to finish each story before I start posting chapters, but I'm going to have to change that up, since I haven't actually started writing this one yet. I'll be posting chapters as they're finished, so there will be more of a wait between each one. The first chapter will be up sometime in May.
> 
> Thanks for reading, and thanks for your patience!

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you everyone who's left kudos or comments so far! It's great to know that you're enjoying the series, especially during weeks like this when I'm beating my head against the keyboard.
> 
> Originally this story was inspired by "In Between" by Glass Cases. When I was outlining this one, I started collecting other songs to help me get into Constantin's head, like "Mountain at My Gates" by Foals and "Salt and the Sea" by The Lumineers. Lyrics are from "Mountain at My Gates," which is pretty perfect for this part of Constantin's story.
> 
> Chapter 2 will be up on 4/11, and Chapter 3 (hopefully) will be up on 4/18.


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